Akatsuki no Breakers

~ the goodbye ~

In 2018 the Nintendo Switch was still understood as a console you bought games for. CyberStep put a free one on it with an item shop inside, six months before it put the same game on a phone. That ordering is the whole oddity of Akatsuki no Breakers: an operated free-to-play service, with the economics and the gacha pulls that implies, released on a Nintendo machine first and on the device the format was invented for last.

It was a battle action game set in a near-future Japan overrun by misshapen creatures called Ghouls. The protagonist was a boy named Silver who had lost his memory, and he fought alongside five others the game called Enchants. Up to six people could play at once. CyberStep had a decade of this behind it already, having run Cosmic Break and Onigiri as long-lived free-to-play services, so the model was not new to them.

The Switch version shipped on 5 July 2018. A PC version arrived on Steam on 27 November, and the smartphone build landed on 18 December, which put all three on the market inside six months.

It had also changed its name before anyone played it. When CyberStep announced the game in January 2018, it was called Akatsuki no Eiyuu: Breakers, and the English games press translated that as Heroes of Dawn. By release the heroes had been dropped from the title and it was simply Akatsuki no Breakers. No English-language version ever shipped under either name.

~ the chronicle ~

~ how it landed ~

CyberStep tested it outside Japan before launch, running betas through Singapore and the Philippines, which suggests an international release was at least on the table. It never came. The game stayed Japanese, and the only way anyone outside the region met it was by reading about it.

That includes me. The game carried two locks from where I am sitting: it stayed inside the Japanese store, and the build that came first ran only on a console I have never owned. Reading about it afterward is the whole of my access to it. What earns it a page is the release order, a strange decision somebody made on purpose and that almost nobody has repeated since.

~ the decline ~

Nothing about the company explains it. CyberStep closed its financial year in May 2020 with sales of 12.997 billion yen, up 12.5 percent, the best in its history. Two months after that, on the evening of 30 July, it announced the game would end. There was a Nijisanji collaboration running that spring, which is where a publisher puts money when it is still backing a title rather than winding one down.

The servers stopped at 14:00 on Thursday 29 October 2020. The game is on no store now. There is no Steam page and nothing left in the Japanese App Store to install. Two years and four months, across three platforms, and what remains of it is a shutdown notice and some screenshots on a Japanese games site.

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